OpenAI’s new enemy of Dall-E is a creation of the Chinese Alibaba

10 July 202310 months ago babelfish

Even Alibaba has its own artificial intelligence (AI) image generator. His name is Tongyi Wanxiang, he speaks Chinese and English and promises war on Western competitors Dall-E of OpenAI, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio. All the details

Among the dreaded artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, which could wreck photographers, creatives and artists, there is a new entry. Its name is Tongyi Wanxiang and it is the Chinese technology company Alibaba Group 's tool that can create images with different styles according to user requests. Furthermore, it is possible to speak to him not only Chinese but also English.

THE CHINESE RESPONSE TO WESTERN AI IMAGE GENERATORS

If the giant Alibaba has fielded the AI Tongyi Qianwen to challenge the OpenAI ChatGpt chatbot, a competitor could not be missing also for the image generators Dall-E (also by OpenAI), Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio.

The Eastern answer is Tongyi Wanxiang, which means "truth from tens of thousands of images." It is currently available in beta for enterprise customers in China.

HOW TONGYI WANXIANG WORKS

Tongyi Wanxiang, currently in beta stage, responds to user requests in both Chinese and English. In fact, it is sufficient to enter a description of the image to be obtained and the application generates various results that are as coherent as possible with what is requested.

“With the release of Tongyi Wanxiang, high-quality AI-generated images will become more accessible, facilitating the development of innovative AI art and creative expression for businesses across a range of industries, including e-commerce, games, design and advertising,” said Alibaba Cloud Intelligence CTO, Jingren Zhou.

WHAT CAN HE DO

Alibaba's application, as the company explains , following a text input, "produces images in a wide range of styles ranging from watercolor and oil and Chinese painting to animation, sketch, all 3D flat and cartoon illustration”.

Tongyi Wanxiang can also transform existing images into new images with a similar style while preserving the original content but applying a different style to it.

Here are some examples published in the Alibaba release:

THE OTHER NEWS FROM ALIBABA

At Tongyi Wanxiang's presentation, Alibaba also launched ModelScopeGPT, a framework designed "to assist users in performing complex and specialized AI tasks in the domains of language, vision, and speech by leveraging different AI models on ModelScope," a Open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform introduced by Alibaba Cloud last year, with over 900 AI models.

WHAT IS GENERATIVE AI WORTH

All, absolutely all Big Techs are continuing to invest in generative AI. From Alibaba to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta but also the platform that provides photographic content, music and editing tools Shutterstock, which has even signed an agreement with OpenAI. And according to Reuters , Chinese tech companies, in particular, “are aggressively developing AI products after OpenAI's ChatGpt chatbot kick-started a generative AI boom.”

Generative AI could add $4.4 trillion in value to the global economy each year, according to consulting firm McKinsey.

THE (OPEN) ISSUE OF COPYRIGHT

But what about copyright with the advance of generative AI? Already some US writers have taken legal action accusing the companies behind the artificial intelligences of training them using works belonging to authors who have not given their consent.

In January, Quartz recalls, a group of visual artists sued Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, alleging that these AI engines used the artwork of human artists to produce images in their style. And in May, Ashley Irwin, president of the Society of Composers and Lyricist, told a House Judiciary subcommittee that "creators' copyrights must be protected by generative AI systems."

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/il-nuovo-nemico-di-dall-e-di-openai-e-una-creazione-della-cinese-alibaba/ on Mon, 10 Jul 2023 09:28:14 +0000.